Requiem for Nature
1999. John Terbourgh.
Island Press, Washington, D.C. 234 pp.
Dictionaries
define requiem as a hymn, composition, or service for the
dead. So the title of this book suggests that nature is already
deceased. Is this true? Does John Terbourgh, James B. Duke
Professor of Environmental Science and Botany and co-director
of the Center for Tropical Conservation at Duke University,
and one of the worlds most respected tropical biologists,
believe nature is done for? Not entirely, but in his Requiem
for Nature, Terbourgh reveals a deep pessimism about our ability
to prevent the extinction of nature. He also reveals his outrage
at this state of affairs.
His anger has deep roots. Growing up in northern Virginia in the boom years after World War II, he saw the forests and fields he so joyfully explored disappear before his eyes, turned into subdivisions and shopping centers. As one who truly loves wild nature and has spent half of his life living in the Peruvian tropical rainforest, he rails against his loss like a devoted spouse helplessly watching the painful death of his mate. He is vociferous in his condemnation of politicians and governments and the corporations they collude with to despoil the Earth. Not even major conservation organizations escape criticism.
Is he right? Its impossible to dismiss his concerns. Terbourgh writes, "the greatest challenges of conservation involve nonscientific issues: overpopulation, inequities of power and wealth, exhaustion of natural resources, corruption, lawlessness, poverty, social unrest." In other words, we can save nature only if we change human nature. Thats a pretty tall order, made all the more so by his belief that wild nature and the biodiversity it supports are a luxury item. Thus he dismisses any utilitarian argument for conservation. "The fundamental arguments for conservation must be spiritual and aesthetic, motivated by feelings that well up from our deepest beings. What is absolute, enduring, and irreplaceable is the primordial nourishment of our psyches afforded by a quiet walk in an ancient forest or the spectacle of a thousand snow geese against a blue sky on a crisp winter day." But hungry people are unlikely to choose nourishing their souls over nourishing their stomachs, and that is the crux of the problem: Wild nature is doomed by human nature.
In Terbourghs view, the only way around this inevitability is through strong national or international institutions that regulate land and resource use for sustainability, and that enforce tough laws to protect parks as the last repositories of biodiversity. Doubting the ability or willingness of most nations, especially in the tropics, to do this, he favors an international approach, such as the deployment of "nature keeping forces," akin to United Nations peacekeeping forces, to trouble spots around the world.
Many conservationists disagree, arguing that only "bottom-up" not "top-down" solutions to conservation will be effective in the long run. They seek not to send in the troops but to create volunteer "armies" of people who want to save nature because doing so improves their material as well as their spiritual well-being. The challenge is how to do this. Where this approach has been successfulin Nepal, for instanceeconomic benefits to local communities come largely from ecotourism, which Terbourgh notes will work only in a few places that tourists want to visit. But conservationists promoting people-friendly conservation solutions know ecotourism is not a panacea and are looking for other ways to make nature worth materially more alive than dead.
Requiem for Nature is an important book. It frames the ongoing debate in the conservation community about the best way to save biodiversity, and serves notice to all of us about how difficult and desperate the situation is. But it also presents a view that may well be part of the problem, not part of the solution. Terbourgh seems to believe the only nature worth saving is the nature that exists in splendid isolation from people, unless those people happen to be a chosen fewtropical biologists and the likewho use nature only to uplift their spirits and enrich their minds.
Terbourgh is expansive in his praise of the U.S. National Park Service as the stalwart protector and savior of what nature is left in our country. But parks are politically possible because huge numbers of Americans like them and use them. Put armed guards around the boundaries of our parks to keep people out and see how long that support lasts. Yet this is how Terbourgh and others suggest parks must be protected elsewhere around the world. How are people forcibly excluded from nature ever going to come to appreciate it?
In concluding Requiem for Nature, Terbourgh does hold out hope for the resurrection of nature. "Somehow," he writes, "we are going to have to face the fact that rational and restrained use of renewable resources offers the only route to future peace and prosperity. The person who leads the way to ending the tragedy of the commons will truly be the person who saves the world." But if Terbourghs mournful title is not to become true, that person better turn up soon.
Susan Lumpkin
